MY LIBRARY IS MY HOME

You name it and she's probably read it - Roza Pretorius has over 50 000 books in her Pretoria home and each one is special to her

- SIPHOKAZI ZAMA

BEFORE you even enter the house, you can tell a book-lover lives here.

There's an earthy, B woody scent in the air that hits you as you walk in from the gate. The front porch is a reader's dream: a comfy brown leather couch you just want to sink into, with a small coffee table in front of it and two armchairs.

And there are books everywhere: on the table, beside the couch, behind the couch, piled high on bookcases. Step inside and there's more. Every room, apart from the kitchen, is packed with books.

In fact, Roza Pretorius owns more than 50 000 books, all jostling for space in her house in Muckleneuk, Pretoria. Shelves are filled to the brim with books, which are organised alphabetically and by type.

Amazingly, the 75-year-old knows exactly where everything is. "Organised chaos is what I call it," she says.

To accommodate all her books, Roza no longer has a lounge, dining room, a downstairs flat or a garage. Half of her bedroom is home to crates and boxes filled with books. It's the same in the passage. Her collection, which she's been growing since she was a child, has every kind of book you can imagine: novels, autobiographies, history, fiction, poetry and non-fiction.

She has books written in Afrikaans, English and Dutch.

"I've got an addictive personality,' she says. "The books keep me happy. They are my way of escaping from reality."

Roza has a great desire to expand her horizons, so she reads anything and everything. "If you always read the same kind of books, you'll never learn. You have to move past the Enid Blytons and try something else, otherwise you'll end up reading Mills and Boon your whole life," she says.

Her favourite place to look for books is the church fête. "Besides the pancakes, there are always books on sale," she says happily.